Education in the Critical Infrastructure: Continuity, Adaptability, and Innovation in Unusual Times

September 11, 2020

Education is a part of a nation's critical infrastructure. Over decades, critical infrastructure sectors have evolved methods for managing business continuity in abnormal operating conditions to ensure critical products and services reach the population. In education, business continuity is essentially learning continuity—the ability to offer education in an unusual time.

This webinar will focus on adaptability in response COVID-related challenges, including the use of short-term solutions and strategic planning for technology and continuity frameworks, as well as ways to leverage solutions already proven by other critical infrastructure sectors. Discussion will target ways to adapt and achieve resiliency, offering students a flexible environment that overcomes current and future operating challenges.

This will be an interactive webinar, with topics addressing

  • Use of technology, including e-learning, security, and maintenance
  • Safety and creating a functional environment with incident planning, student alerts, and administrative communication
  • Strategic planning, including establishing new areas of responsibility, backup plans, and risk evaluation

Presenter: Annie McIntyre, President, Ardua Strategies, Inc.

Presenter Biography: Annie McIntyre is President and Chief Executive Officer of Ardua Strategies, Inc., a Texas Corporation, providing solutions for the cyber and operational security issues of energy and infrastructure. Prior to founding Ardua Strategies, McIntyre was a Principal Member of Technical Staff and Program Manager at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her research areas at Sandia included threats, vulnerabilities, and protection of critical infrastructure systems, and cybersecurity for fossil and renewable energy systems. She managed the Sandia-Forest City Strategic Partnership program for sustainability, and participated in programs such as the Institute for Infrastructure Information Protection (I3P), and National SCADA Test Bed. McIntyre conducted the first cyberanalysis of a renewable system in 2007 for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Prior to work in critical infrastructure, McIntyre worked extensively in the defense sector on information warfare and survivability, serving as IO Laboratory Chief and Information Warfare Lead for Future Combat Systems Assessments at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. She previously served as New Mexico Regional Manager for Concurrent Technologies Corporation, a defense and energy contractor, and performed systems analysis and engineering in the bioinformatics field for Molecular Informatics, Inc. Throughout her career, she has worked closely with the U.S. Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, and Defense.

McIntyre conducts extensive work on security policies as they relate to energy and infrastructure. She served as an author for the American Petroleum Institute’s SCADA Security Standard (1164), serves on the Advisory Council at the North American Energy Standards Board, and has served as a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Technology Leadership Institute.

McIntyre holds a Bachelor of Science from New Mexico Tech, a Master of Science from Troy State University, and has been a lifelong member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. She is a Licensed Private Investigator in the State of Texas.